Report, Embassy of Hungary in North Korea to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, 15 November 1968

    […] As is well-known, a Japanese party delegation visited the DPRK this year. […]

    According to the information received from the Bulgarian Ambassador – the ambassador had gotten that information through their embassy in Tokyo –, certain disagreements cropped up between the Japanese Communist Party and the Korean Workers’ Party. According to the Bulgarian information, the Japanese side does not agree with that the Korean comrades drop persons behind South Korean lines in order to carry out subversive activities, and they even use Japanese territory for this purpose. Nor does the Japanese side approve the North Korean initiatives along the Demilitarized Zone. Presumably, the Bulgarian Ambassador said, this issue was also raised in the course of the Japanese-Korean inter-party discussions. According to the opinion of the Bulgarians, the most recent statements of the KWP leaders, made with regard to the 20th anniversary of the proclamation of the DPRK, suggested that the Korean leadership stressed its peaceful intentions concerning [national] unification so as to convince the Japanese comrades of the correctness of its previous standpoint, or that it adopted the Japanese view.

    Recently the Korean press, in comparison with the previous situation, hardly publishes any information or article about the Japanese Communist Party and its struggle, which also indicates troubles in the development of Japanese-Korean inter-party relations. Nor do the articles the Korean press publishes about the resurgence of Japanese militarism make mention of the related standpoint of the Japanese CP, and the active support of the JCP’s struggle, in the same way as it did in previous articles.

    Nevertheless, the Koreans, on their part, do not initiate an open polemics with the JCP. On the basis of the information received from home, the JCP’s standpoint with regard to the steps taken in order to straighten the Czechoslovak events out is known [to us]. To our knowledge, the Korean Workers’ Party does not share the JCP’s opinion in this respect either.

    Comrade Etre recently had a conversation with Akahata’s correspondent to Pyongyang, who previously had readily spoken about the good cooperation with the KWP, but now he was averse to take a stand on the issue.

                                                                                                                          István Kádas          

                                                                                                                          (Ambassador)